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This article has a good spirit, but ultimately fails in content and research.

I'll go through each of the points.

THE HARDWARE LAYER
discover and kudzu are two hardware detection tools that work. discover is recommended very heavily, as it does a lot of the dirty work involved in hardware probing, and does it well. It has a library (libdiscover2) which provides programmers with a way to get information on hardware information. Havoc Pennington has commented on getting hardware to "just work" and Freedesktop.org is hosting a project, HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) which is attempting to provide programmers with access to hardware in an elegant way. In other words, there are efforts underway here.

As for configuration for things like a network card, distributions like SuSE (with YaST) have provided ways to do this which are very similar to Windows for a long time. Yes, if you are running a barebones distro, you will have to edit this information "by hand" in /etc, but remember, Linux is just a kernel; it's the distribution that matters.

ON X11
X has already been identified as a bottleneck for desktop linux, but don't underestimate the power bad video card drivers have on this impression. Nvidia produces very good drivers for Linux that provide excellent performance in X. But X's free DRI support via the DRI project, although commendable in its effort, isn't up to snuff in terms of raw graphic speed. Plus, ATI's proprietary drivers are a joke. But this doens't have much to do with X.

X does have problems, but listen to the editors: it needs to be taken in a new direction, not scrapped entirely. Keith Packard is on the right track at Freedesktop.org. Y Windows is something entirely different from X in MANY ways, by the by. Read the paper by the CS student coding it.

ON GTK/QT LOOKING THE SAME
This is such a minor issue IMO, but desktop "pundits" seem to constantly latch onto it. Windows users deal with non-standard interfaces all the time, but they don't care. Look at ICQ, Yahoo messenger, WinAmp, iTunes, Easy CD Creator, LimeWire, to name a few. These are still popular and usable applications. And Mac OS, for all its uniform interface broo-ha-ha, has those metal apps and those aqua apps intermingled with blatant disregard for the user's sanity

There are actually already efforts to unify gtk and qt, but it's pointless to me. Besides, KDE and GTK already look pretty much the same (I think GTK apps tend to look a little nicer), so who cares? The more important thing is providing a way for a Gnome user to start up KDE apps without having to load up a billion KDE libraries, or at least make that process less noticable.

ON "NEW" IDEAS
Pooled storage? This must be a joke. I can pop in a new hard drive and mount it wherever I want on my Linux system. What the hell is the author talking about?

Nautilus viewers. Guess what--they existed. In some early 2.x version of Nautilus, there was a "View As Music Collection" that was a music player. Was buggy as hell though, so they removed it. The framework for view panes is there though, just that nobody has been stepping up to code some new views.

BOTTOM LINE
Stuff author is clamoring for is already under development, so put on your coding hat and help out. Most ideas in this article aren't new, though some are.

By the way, I hate the tagline. "Why has DL evolved at such a glacial pace?" Glacial pace? It's taken Microsoft like 8 iterations of Windows to come to "Windows XP," with a UI not much better than Windows 95. In half that time a slew of DEs, Window Managers, and desktop environments have evolved and flowered on Linux. Glacial? C'mon. Give these guys some credit.